Apricot Benefits the Liver, Eyes & Digestive System

Gastrointestinal Bleeding

Recreational fishing is fishing for pleasure or competition; it can be contrasted with commercial fishing , which is fishing for profit. Gastrointestinal tracts of a carnivorous hawk, an omnivorous chicken, and 4 herbivorous birds. Retrieved 18 January A healthy pancreas produces the correct chemicals in the proper quantities, at the right times, to digest the foods we eat. Pigeon 'milk' also contains IgA antibodies and antioxidants carotenoids. In addition, bristles around the mouth may help protect the eyes from food items a bird is trying to capture Conover and Miller

It’s an anatomy cake of SCIENCE!!!!

The endocrine component of the pancreas consists of islet cells islets of Langerhans that create and release important hormones directly into the bloodstream. Two of the main pancreatic hormones are insulin , which acts to lower blood sugar, and glucagon , which acts to raise blood sugar. Maintaining proper blood sugar levels is crucial to the functioning of key organs including the brain, liver, and kidneys.

Each disorder may exhibit different symptoms and requires different treatments. Pancreatitis is inflammation of the pancreas that occurs when pancreatic enzyme secretions build up and begin to digest the organ itself.

It can occur as acute painful attacks lasting a matter of days, or it may be a chronic condition that progresses over a period of years. Learn about pancreatitis, its causes, and treatment options in the pancreatitis section of this site. The exact cause of pancreatic cancer is still unknown, but there are known risk factors that increase the risk of developing the disease. Cigarette smoking, a family history of pancreatic cancer or hereditary cancer syndromes, and chronic pancreatitis are some of these factors.

The most common form of pancreatic cancer is pancreatic adenocarcinoma, an exocrine tumor arising from the cells lining the pancreatic duct. Learn about the various forms of pancreatic cancer and their treatments here. Columbia University Medical Center.

The Pancreas and Its Functions. Many cats with chronic pancreatic also have chronic or recurrent diarrhea — particularly when biopsies show that their livers are also chronically inflamed. IBD is actually a catch-all term that includes a number of discrete conditions. If biopsies are taken from your pet due to the suspicion of pancreatic, they should also be taken from those upper areas of the intestine.

This is because another chronic problem, lymphocytic-plasmacytic gastroenteritis LPG , can cause the same symptoms. Diabetes is not a part of triad disease. You can read my article about diabetes in cats here. For a more extensive explanation, go here. They often sit erect, looking off in space, with their paws tucked under them and their eyes partially closed - like the cat above.

These cats are lethargic and not interested in their surroundings. Most eat and drink less and, consequently, they loose weight and become dehydrated. If the problem is severe, they often pant or mouth breath. A few vomit or have diarrhea. A few run fevers. Subnormal temperature below Many are uncomfortable or meow when you prod or squeeze their tummies.

In fact, they can eat more than before. But they never regain their prior weight because they no longer produce the enzymes they need to absorb the food. Food passing through their digestive tract undigested may cause their stools to be loose, smelly and pale. This leads to bacterial overgrowth with undesirable organisms.

Some of these cats get treated with metronidazole which often does bring about temporary improvement. Others get misdiagnosed as having a giardia infection. With good care, the vast majority of cats survive the attack that first brings them to the veterinary hospital. If your veterinarian can induce your cat to eat, it should do well and return home. Cats hate veterinary hospitals.

If you yourself can spend time at the hospital, petting, reassuring and talking to your pet, your cat is more likely to heal. That and loving, individualized, nursing care are the keys to success. Once your cat has been stabilized and sent back home, it will most likely need a special diet and occasional medications throughout its life.

With that special care, it should live a very long time. Your veterinarian will want to perform a physical examination of your cat. There are no specific physical signs that announce pancreatitis. Your cat might indicate to your veterinarian that its abdomen is tender and sometimes, a firm, inflamed pancreas can actually be felt. Occasionally neurological signs accompany pancreatitis. If it fails to snap back promptly, your vet will know your pet is dehydrated. Your vet may notice that your pet has lost weight since its last visit.

Standard blood panels and urine examination will not be very helpful in getting your veterinarian to a diagnosis. They are the logical starting off point with any sick cat, but the results are never diagnostic.

Cats with pancreatitis sometimes have an elevated white blood cell count. Electrolyte sodium, potassium, chloride changes are common because so many cats with pancreatitis are dehydrated. Liver enzymes ALP etc. High, low or normal blood lipase or amylase are not significant in cats with pancreatitis. About a quarter of cats with pancreatitis are anemic. You can go to this page to see normal blood values for your cat.

There are two blood tests that are very helpful in diagnosing pancreatitis in cats. One is the serum trypsin-like immunoreactivity test and the other, the pancreatic lipase immunoreactivity test. The vast majority of trypsin moves directly from your cat's pancreas to the intestine through the pancreatic duct. When the amount in the blood is too high, the pancreas is leaking more than it should into the blood stream due to inflammation.

There is controversy as to the accuracy of this test. Some feel it is very accurate in identifying cats with pancreatic problems, others less so. This is because other areas of the body, besides the pancreas, produce lipase.

But since , a more sensitive radioimmunoassay test that zeros in on only the lipase produced in the pancreas has become available. Cats with substantial acute pancreatitis and cats with substantial pancreatic scaring insufficiency can usually be identified with this test. The test is not as effective in detecting cats with mild to moderate disease.

The ultrasound machine has become as important to your veterinarian in the 21st Century as the stethoscope was in the 20th. In the hands of a highly skilled ultrasonographer, ultrasound will detect a bit less than half of the cases of acute pancreatitis in cats depending on the skill of the radiologist.

Ultrasound is also quite helpful in detecting the liver and intestinal changes that commonly accompany pancreatitis. It is also an excellent way to rule out other abdominal conditions in your cat that might be mistaken for pancreatitis. The eye or a portion of it is half seen, obstructed, shadowed, partly out of focus, more or less round, multicolored, and perhaps moving. Now, a safe few meters away, are you going to go back to see whether that was food? Associated body patterns often suggest other head and facial features, which in turn enhance the eye-like nature of the spots.

None of these patterns exactly matches the eyes or face of any particular species of predator; but, even when quickly and partially glimpsed, all give the illusion of an eye or face. These false eyes are mimicking the eyes and faces of such predators of insect-eating birds as snakes, lizards, other birds, and small mammals, as perceived at close range by the insectivorous birds in their natural world.

Note the distended throat of this American Kestrel. Pigeons generally lay two eggs one day apart, which hatch 18 days after they are laid. A similar substance is produced by flamingos and male Emperor Penguins. The normal function of the crop is food storage. Pigeon 'milk' also contains IgA antibodies and antioxidants carotenoids.

Optimal foraging theory predicts that organisms feeding on patchy resources should maximize their food loads within each patch, and should digest these loads quickly to minimize travelling costs between food patches. GPS-tracking of 40 Wandering Albatrosses from the Crozet archipelago during the incubation phase confirmed foraging movements of between — km, giving the birds access to a variety of prey, including fishery wastes.

Using miniaturized, autonomous data recorders placed in the stomach of three birds, the first-ever measurements of gastric pH and temperature in procellariformes were obtained. Such low stomach pH gives Wandering Albatrosses a strategic advantage because it allows a rapid chemical breakdown of ingested food and rapid digestion.

This is useful for feeding on patchy, natural prey, but also on fishery wastes, which might be an important additional food resource for Wandering Albatrosses. It is likely that this physiological characteristic evolved as a response to a diet largely composed of squid, and to a patchy distribution of this food resource resulting in large, infrequent meals.

The strategy of Wandering Albatrosses is to cover long distances rapidly and at low costs to increase the probability of encountering dispersed prey patches whose distribution is unpredictable.

Knots with large gizzards consumed far more molluscs with shells than the birds with smaller gizzards. Birds with smaller gizzards simply couldn't feed fast enough. By allowing them to crush more shell per gizzard-full, larger gizzards gave birds the edge. Thus, even though it is energetically costly for the knots to maintain a larger gizzard, when the bird needs to get the most out of its crunchy diet, it's a price worth paying.

So, the birds' gizzards enlarge as they fatten for migration. Because the molluscs' shells stay the same size as the molluscs shrink, the amount of shell a bird must process to eat its fill also increases. But with their larger gizzards, the birds can still make the most of even the crunchiest winter diet!

Within 14 days, they showed a doubling of the size of their gizzards. Red Knots have strong muscular gizzards for feeding on molluscs. A shift back to a mussel diet induced about a doubling in gizzard mass in just a few days.

As the knots were fed progessively smaller mussels day 22 to day 46 that are easier to crush, gizzard mass again declined. A switch back to a soft food pellet diet caused a further decline in gizzard mass. Finally, a switch back to a mussel diet again cause a rapid increase in gizzard mass From: Piersma and Drent Ostrich Struthio camelus stomach. Note how particle size of material in the gizzard ventriculus is smaller than in the proventriculus due to the grinding action of the muscular walls plus small pebbles gastroliths.

The capacity to reduce particle size is related to the metabolic demands of a species. Therefore, particle size reduction is often considered the key digestive difference between ecto- and endotherms that allows endotherms to rely on shorter digesta retention times without losing digestive efficiency, and hence facilitate the high level of food intake necessary to meet their increased metabolic requirements.

In contrast, adaptations for chewing intrinsically increase the weight of the head. The use of the gizzard system has the potential advantages that intake rate is not limited by chewing, that no investment in dental tissue is necessary, and that dental wear is not a determinant of senescence as observed in mammals.

The absence of age-dependent tooth wear might even be a contributing factor to the slower onset of senescence in birds as compared to mammals. On the other hand, the use of a gizzard requires the intake of suitable grit or stones—an action that represents, in the few studies where this has actually been quantified in birds, a relevant proportion of feeding time Fritz et al.

Gastrointestinal tracts of a carnivorous hawk, an omnivorous chicken, and 4 herbivorous birds. Note larger size of crop in omnivore and herbivores, and particularly in hoatzin.

Ceca are small in hawks and relatively large in grouse. Although ceca are relatively small in Hoatzins , Emus, and Ostriches, an expanded foregut Hoatzins , a much longer midgut Emus , or a much longer colon Ostriches compensates for this From: Stevens and Hume Over-reliance on the passive pathway provides metabolic advantages and ecological constraints.

It does provide birds with an absorptive process that can deal with rapid and large changes in intestinal sugar concentrations. The passive pathway is also energetically inexpensive to maintain and modulate. However, passive absorption through the paracellular pathway is dependent on concentration gradients. In the absence of a transport system that selects which materials to absorb, this non-discriminatory pathway may also increase vulnerability to toxins, and thus constrain foraging behavior and limit the breadth of the dietary niche of the birds.

Another problem is that when luminal sugar concentrations are lower than those in plasma, glucose may diffuse back into the lumen. Cross-section of the intestine ileum of a Spotted Tinamou Nothura maculosa. Villi are lined with columnar epithelium EP , including goblet cells arrows that secrete mucus. The muscle layer includes longitudinal fibers MI on the perimeter, circular fibers Mc , and additional longitudinal fibers at the base of the villi muscularis muscosae; MM From: Chikilian and de Speroni Blue-headed Parrots at clay lick.

Meyer-Rochow and Gal determined that the pressures involved could be approximated if they knew the 1 distance the feces traveled, 2 density and viscosity of the material, and 3 shape, aperture, and height of the anus above ground. How penguins choose the direction of defecation, and how wind direction factors into that decision, remain unknown. Avian Pancreas tissue Source: The Avian Digestive Tract. Avian geophagy and soil characteristics in southeastern Peru.

Luminal morphology of the avian lower intestine: Histological aspects of the stomach proventriculus and gizzard of the Red-capped Cardinal Paroaria gularis gularis. Comparative study of the digestive system of three species of tinamou. Crypturellus tataupa, Nothoprocta cinerascens , and Nothura maculosa Aves: Journal of Morphology Journal of Experimental Zoology Rictal bristle function in Willow Flycatcher.

Dysplastic koilin causing proventricular obstruction in an Eclectus Parrot Eclectus roratus. Journal of Avian Medicine and Surgery Anatomy and physiology of the digestive system in fowl.

Pages in Proc. An histological and histochemical analysis of the inner lining and glandular epithelium of the chicken gizzard. American Journal of Anatomy An ecomorphological study of the raptorial digital tendon locking mechanism. Dietary and developmental regulation of intestinal sugar transport. Digesta retention patterns in geese Anser anser and turkeys Meleagris gallopavo and deduced function of avian caeca.

Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology A Histological and global gene expression analysis of the 'lactating' pigeon crop. Vultures of the seas: Evolution of the structure and function of the vertebrate tongue. Journal of Anatomy Light and scanning electron microscopic study of the tongue in the cormorant Phalacrocorax carbo Phalacrocoracidae, Aves. Functional morphology of the tongue in the nutcracker Nucifraga caryocatactes.

A tropical horde of counterfeit predator eyes. Instructed learning in the auditory localization pathway of the Barn Owl. The morphology of the bill apparatus in the Steller's Sea Eagle. Wild Bird Society of Japan, Tokyo. Use of dung as a tool by burrowing owls.

The integration of energy and nitrogen balance in the hummingbird Sephanoides sephaniodes. Does gut function limit hummingbird food intake? Physiological and Biochemical Zoology Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation. Scare tactics in a neotropical warbler: Gliding flight and soaring. Theoretical Ecology Series, vol. Modelling the flying bird C. Structure, form, and function of flight in engineering and the living world.

Phenotypic flexibility and the evolution of organismal design. Trends in Ecology and Evolution The hummingbird tongue is a fluid trap, not a capillary tube. Between air and water: Use of prey hotspots by an avian predator: Structure and mechanical behavior of a toucan beak.

Movement and direction of movement of a simulated prey affect the success rate in Barn Owl Tyto alba attack. Musculoskeletal underpinnings to differences in killing behavior between North American accipiters Falconiformes: Accipitridae and falcons Falconidae.

Journal of Morphology, online early. Le Bohec, and Y. Adjustments of gastric pH, motility and temperature during long-term preservation of stomach contents in free-ranging incubating King Penguins. Journal of Experimental Biology A tough nut to crack. Adaptations to seed cracking in finches. Cost-benefit analysis of mollusc-eating in a shorebird. Optimizing gizzard size in the face of seasonal demands. How do woodpeckers extract grubs with their tongues?

Why do woodpeckers resist head impact injury: Functional morphology of raptor hindlimbs: The turning- and linear-maneuvering performance of birds: Canadian Journal of Zoology Hummingbird jaw bends to aid insect capture.

A mechanical analysis of woodpecker drumming and its application to shock-absorbing systems. I - Introduction to Birds. VII - Circulatory System. Back to Avian Biology. Drawings of the digestive tracts of A a Greylag Goose and B a Wild Turkey and retention times of a solute, 2-mm particles, and 8-mm particles in the goose and turkey digestive systems Figure from Frei et al.